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Wednesday, August 21, 2013

WIP: High Elf Dragonlord Part 12

Third day of the Dragon Week: Don't forget to check my Facebook Page for teaser images of the finished Dragon. One every afternoon during the Dragon Week!

The neck is a very sensitive part. It's built from scratch, so the armour plaques may not be as polished and flat as one would desire, especially if the objective is creating metallics. These will look awful on a rough surface. Once the priming is on, you can see defects much better, so I use the opportunity to scrape out some rough parts, even with paint on top.

And once that's fixed, I prefer to prime it black. I am going to use metallic paints, and it is way easier to start this way.

First steps of the metallic approach.

Paiting by parts is not good for this kind of work. I'm painting metallics but I don't really know how the global impression would be once the dragon is all mounted.

Once I have it more or less advanced, I put it on the dragon, to see how it looks.

Once the colours start to build up together, I can see that some things need ajusting. The tongue is now going to be more turquoise.

When I get tired of one surface, I switch to another area. Back to the lower part and the skin patterns.

The plaque that was primed black will also be metallic, in the same way as the neck plaques.

Now I'm going to concentrate on the upper part of the body. I'm not really sure what to do now, so I'm just going to prime the scales in black first, maybe it will give me an idea of how darker scales would look.

I'm not satisfied with different colours that I try, so I will stick to red on the scales too. This first approach is a warmer red. Also I begin the painting on the hands.

With the wings without paint on top. I start to get a sense of colour.

The scales are too similar to the skin. I will try another approach by using yellow colour as a starting point and then glazing red on top.

Also, I want the skin to look scaly, so I will do a pattern over the whole dragon trying to resemble lizard scales. It's a lot of work, but I like it.

The same is done in the legs.

In this photo you can see the difference of simple red scales (left) versus the corrected light version using yellows and purples.

The metal plaques of the body will be done in the same way as the ones in the neck. First, priming black.

But first I will paint the horns of the body.

Painting the metallic parts with green inks and dark sea blue.

The leather straps are painted with browns and mixing them with yellow/white for the upper parts.